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Autonomous cars are not entirely strangers to the race track. Earlier this year we brought you news of Robby, the autonomous Audi RS7 that has learned the racing line at Sonoma Raceway in California. Robby is apparently as fast as an experienced human racing driver when it comes to lap times, but there's more to racing than just being fast—you need competition. Next year we'll finally get to see what happens when you put 20 autonomous cars on track and race them, thanks to the newly announced support series for Formula E.

Called Roborace, the new series is a partnership between Formula E and Kinetik, an investment fund that's been putting a lot of money into electric vehicle development. It will follow the Formula E schedule in 2016-2017 with hour-long races between 10 teams, each of which has two cars. The cars will be mechanically identical; the competition will be in coding the AI. According to the release from Formula E, one of the teams will be organized as a crowd-sourced community team, something we plan to look into with greater detail as it develops.

Kinetik founder Denis Sverdlov said that Roborace "is a celebration of revolutionary technology and innovation that humanity has achieved in that area so far. It’s a global platform to show that robotic technologies and AI can co-exist with us in real life. Thus, anyone who is at the edge of this transformation now has a platform to show the advantages of their driverless solutions and this shall push the development of the technology.”

It's an interesting move, and Formula E is certainly the right partner for Roborace, but even that series has still to win over some motorsport diehards. Will people still find racing interesting if there aren't humans in the cars? It may dissuade those who only show up to watch the crashes, but perhaps their places can be taken by AI enthusiasts and futurologists. I mean, what's more futuristic than robots racing each other?